'As always in MacLaverty’s pages , everything is alive with absorbing actuality. Characterisation has total credibility. Dialogue is pitch perfect…. Seamus Heaney recorded Ulster’s tribal butchery in great poetry. MacLaverty does so in great fiction.'
Peter Kemp The Sunday Times 16 July 2017

'MacLaverty makes an impressive return with Midwinter Break: the small details of an elderly couple’s trip to Amsterdam build into a profound portrait of ageing, alcoholism, faith and love.'
The Guardian 26 July 2017